


my three wishes clutched in her hand

by mollivanders



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: AU - Battlestar Galactica, Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2019-04-13 13:41:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14113569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mollivanders/pseuds/mollivanders
Summary: A Rogue One RebelcaptainBattlestar GalacticaAU told in broad strokes.





	my three wishes clutched in her hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firefeufuego](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firefeufuego/gifts).



> Written for firefeufuego for the Holiday Gift Fic giveaway with the prompt of 'BSG or the Good Behavior universe'. I adapted Cassian's story into Gaeta's, and the title comes from [Gaeta's Lament](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0lWRhrdAuA). It has been years since I watched BSG all the way through but I wanted to try adapting these characters into another space story.

She shouldn’t have made it off Gemenon. She shouldn’t have been in the city that day; shouldn’t have been bartering goods from her mother’s farm.

When the first bombs fell, the spaceport fell into panic and the merchant whose ship she’d been loading took off without warning, taking her with him. She watched, helpless, as her home burned below her, sparks of light against a growing darkness.

She shouldn’t have been there. She shouldn’t be here, now. She shouldn’t be alive.

“Trust the gods,” her mother had said to her when she left, as if she knew. She couldn’t have known; her mother’s faith a flimsy remnant of her fighting days. Jyn clutched her mother’s necklace as Gemenon became smaller and smaller, and in a dizzying moment she fell to her knees, eyes locked on what was left of the horizon.

“We’re meeting up with the fleet,” the merchant says gravely when he finally opens the bridge door again. “Didn’t know you were still here.”

(In some ways, she’s not.)

+

Aquaria was nothing much to call home, but even still, he’ll never see it again now. He watches, instead, with everyone else as Caprica burns on the newsfeeds, and then flickers out – the last long-range satellites going up in flames with the rest of the Colonies.

“So say we all,” they all chime with Commander Adama, and he can’t make his lips move in answer. His family was long since dead, buried deep in the ice. The guy next to him nudges him, kicking him into line, and he chokes out the words the next time around. He’s a tactical officer. He’s supposed to set an example.

(His home is burning.)

When it turns out his closest friend’s a frakking Cylon – they look _human_ now, of all frakking things – he loses himself in the nearest cantina and stares down at the bottom of his glass.

“You’ll feel better if you drink,” the bartender says.

(He leaves the glass full.)

Instead, he signs up to work with Gaius Baltar on a Cylon detector. He works and works and follows order and falls into his bunk dreaming of home.

The ice, somehow, still burns.

+

She’s scrounging, surviving on scraps and metal, jumping from service sector to service sector. She’s a farmer, in space. She’s a survivor. She’s a smuggler, and a thief, and nothing like her mother.

She gets called in for questioning as a Cylon.

Baltar seems like a slimy one, but his assistant is more reserved, calmer, and angrier. He stands aside as Baltar challenges her, asks her questions that nobody can verify answers to, and paces around her like an agitated eel.

“Captain Andor will test you,” he says, moving aside to let the other man take a sample of her blood. She stares this second man down just like the first, but there’s a flicker in his gaze as he works. There’s conviction in his eyes and steadiness in his hands and something in her says to trust him.

“She’s clean,” Andor says, his voice a rasp in the night, and she pulls her sleeve back down.

“I’m not a frakking Cylon,” she hisses at Baltar before Andor escorts her out.

She shouldn’t be here, on this ship. She shouldn’t _be alive_ , but she is, and she can’t get transport off because it’s a frakking military vessel with strict protocols, and she’s not her mother. While she’s waiting for permission to leave, she runs into Andor at a cantina.

“Call me Cassian,” he says in that same voice, and her mother’s necklace burns against her chest.

+

Cylon hunting is tedious, and slow, and he splits his time between Baltar’s lab and the bridge. He’s starting to prefer the in-between. He meets Jyn at the same cantina at the same time, when he can, and they drink in slow silence. She doesn’t share much, so he talks about stupid shit, and by the end of the third week, he’s almost made her smile twice. He can’t remember the last time he smiled, but his frakking heart jumps every time he sees her, so that must count for something.

She’s here willingly, at least. He’d gotten her on a job as a transport to _Galactica_ and she shuttles back and forth with the other pilots, transferring algae and other supplies. He doesn’t ask what else she brings along with her.

He’s so frakking sick of algae.

When she’s waiting for him outside the lab one night, her hand warm on his arm, he’s only takes a second to see the change in her eyes.

“I’m sick of the cantina,” she says, her voice still that pleasant mix of pissed-off-at-the-worlds and repressed warmth. “Can we go somewhere else?”

His voices catches as he murmurs _yes_ , his hand already linked with hers, following her lead down below.

+

Civilians aren’t allowed in crew bunks, technically. Officers aren’t allowed leave without permission, technically.

They find a way around the rules.

She bypasses supply locks and storage units and breaks into the sectors of the ship meant for a museum. He should be throwing her into the brig but instead he just looks up at her, steady reassurance and encouragement in his face as he trails kisses down her legs, asking her body a familiar question.

(She answers him, over and over, and he breathes her in.)

“Shouldn’t you be fighting Cylons?” she challenges him, still shaking from his touch as he lies down beside her. “Or commandeering civilian resources?” He traces a pattern across her skin and she shivers, almost losing her train of thought.

The end of the worlds is nothing like she expected.

“It doesn’t look like that’s the way things are going,” he says, and she frowns. “Less and less to fight with,” he explains, and drops a kiss at her jaw. “Fewer to trust.”

“Do you trust me?” she asks, and he smiles like the Colonies didn’t burn and they won’t be eating algae every day for the rest of their lives.

“Trust,” he says, “goes both ways.”

The next day, Colonel Tigh imposes martial law, and she doesn’t see Cassian for a month.

+

He’s demoted and cools his heels in the brig for challenging Tigh and helping Roslin.

He’s not sorry in the least.

But the rumblings of resistance to the military have begun, the seeds growing slowly. They grow inside him, demanding an answer. Slowly, he finds a way.

He finds himself at Baltar’s side once more.

+

She hates New Caprica. It has fresh air, and water, and food that isn’t shit to eat, but it’s not home. It’s a refugee camp. Fortunately, she has a skill set for that.

Cassian feeds her information and tries to work with Baltar, his frustration growing every day. He seems more frustrated than usual, and his face grows thinner, more haggard.

“Something’s coming,” he says one night, a blanket spread under the stars. “It’s too quiet.”

Jyn doesn’t rate a tent, and she doesn’t want Cassian’s help – it could damage her black market credibility – but she doesn’t want one. She just wants this.

“Something always is,” she says, and taps the pistol at her side. “That’s why I still carry this.”

She’s not supposed to have it, as a civilian. He’s not supposed to know. His answer is a kiss, the dark pools of his eyes drawing her under once more.

(Above them, the stars move, ever so slowly, into position.)

It’s the last night they’ll have for a while.

+

He works for Baltar. He works for the Cylons.

(He turns a yellow bowl upside down at night with hidden messages.)

He doesn’t tell Jyn, and he doesn’t see her. He hears about her, and keeps her off the Cylons' radar. Tyrol nearly gets her killed once and in turn Cassian nearly breaks his cover when he finds out. She lived. She smuggled explosives into a building, and she lived. The rest of them didn’t, but she did.

When it’s over – if it’ll ever be over – he wonders if she’ll ever talk to him again.

Tyrol spits in his face, and his former friends turn their backs on him, and he’s _persona non grata_ for good now. He’s demoted again and kicked off the bridge, even after his trial, and he has a hotshot Viper pilot to thank for both.

He sits in a would-be museum, waiting to see if she’ll show.

“I believe you,” she says when she comes, but she doesn’t look at him. Another deep breath, and then she looks him in the eye. “I believe you,” she repeats more firmly, taking his hand, their fingers looping together.

The steady thump of her heart this close to his beats out an old tune, and he believes her in turn.

(Trust, he remembers, goes both ways.)

+

As time goes on, there’s less to smuggle; less to steal. When Earth turns out to be a sham, she watches him punch a dent into the bulkhead and nurse his hand for a week with scarce medical supplies.

(A month later, he loses his leg.)

They won't even let her visit him for a week after the surgery. No matter how she yells at Doc Cottle, she doesn't have any rank worth respecting. When they finally let her in to see him, he's thinner than ever, more haunted, seeking a cause to believe in again. She bows her head over his hospital bed, whispering her mother's prayers, and wishes she had one to give him.

“At least,” he says, “with the Cylons we stood a frakking chance.”

Later - when she hears the rumors, in only the ways she can - she debates whether or not to tell him. His steps grow slower and more agitated, losing the last of his faith in the military he'd served and the government he'd spied to restore.

"Cassian, come back to sleep," she whispers into the darkness and when he lies next to her, she feels his unrest.

"We lost everything before," she says, trying to reason past the cloud around his shoulders. He lost his home, his faith, his rank, his leg. He can't lose anything else.

"Everything I did," he says fervently, "I did for _Galactica_. And every time I walked away from something I wanted to forget I told myself it was for a cause that I believed in. A cause that was worth it. Without that, we’re lost." He pauses. "Everything I’ve done would have been for nothing."

She takes a breath, and remembers her mother; thinks of what she would do.

“There’s another way,” she says, hands clutching her mother's necklace. “You won’t like it.” She pauses again. “I don't like it.”

His eyes burn in the darkness, a spark trying not to go out, and he listens.

(He doesn’t like it.)

He talks to Zarek anyway.

+

“I’m sorry,” she whispers next to him, facing the firing line.

“I’m not,” he answers, and her bound hands find his. They’re both bloody, and ruined, and they’ll never see Earth. Maybe nobody will. His fingers fight to tangle in hers, steady and full of reassurance, one last time.

“They’ll do better next time,” she says, full of conviction and belief for the first time in years. It would seem futile, but somehow – she knows. She shouldn’t, not here – but she does. His hand tightens in hers one last time as the firing squad takes aim.

“Your mother,” he says, “would have been proud of you, Jyn.”

_Finis_

**Author's Note:**

> Please forgive me. You might notice I tweaked Cassian's hangar speech _slightly_ , which I did to contrast how at least in canon he has the support system of fellow rebels - here he's largely on his own.
> 
> I'm [ladytharen](http://ladytharen.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr if you want to say hi!


End file.
